23 Mar
2016
23 Mar
'16
7:20 p.m.
Hello everyone,
I am Rocky and this is my first message. Before starting, I would like to thank you for
all the valuable informations and stories you post here.
About the History of Unix, I was wondering with another guy why the rc script has that
name. As many of you already know, and according to NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD (current)
manual,
"The rc utility is the command script which controls" the startup of various
services, "and is invoked by init(8)" (from DESCRIPTION).
"The rc command appeared in 4.0BSD" (from HISTORY).
Words may slightly change between the three distributions, but the meaning and the
informations provided are the same. So, the etymology of rc does not appear in the man
pages. Do you know how to recover it? Do (or did) the letters rc have some meaning in this
context?
Cheers,
Rocky
23 Mar
23 Mar
7:30 p.m.
They stand for, "run-com" as in "run commands": This was the name for
a
scripting facility in, I believe, CTSS.
On Wed, Mar 23, 2016 at 3:20 PM, Rocky Hotas <rockyhotas(a)post.com> wrote:
Hello everyone,
I am Rocky and this is my first message. Before starting, I would like to
thank you for all the valuable informations and stories you post here.
About the History of Unix, I was wondering with another guy why the rc
script has that name. As many of you already know, and according to NetBSD,
FreeBSD, OpenBSD (current) manual,
"The rc utility is the command script which controls" the startup of
various services, "and is invoked by init(8)" (from DESCRIPTION).
"The rc command appeared in 4.0BSD" (from HISTORY).
Words may slightly change between the three distributions, but the meaning
and the informations provided are the same. So, the etymology of rc does
not appear in the man pages. Do you know how to recover it? Do (or did) the
letters rc have some meaning in this context?
Cheers,
Rocky
7:38 p.m.
According to "The New Hacker's Dictionary" (Eric Raymond, MIT Press,
1991) "the startup script /etc/rc is commonly believed to have been
named after older scripts to 'run commands'". This name was then
adopted by other scripts.
On 23/03/2016 21:20, Rocky Hotas wrote:
About the History of Unix, I was wondering with
another guy why the rc script has that name. As many of you already know, and according to
NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD (current) manual,
"The rc utility is the command script which controls" the startup of various
services, "and is invoked by init(8)" (from DESCRIPTION).
"The rc command appeared in 4.0BSD" (from HISTORY).
Words may slightly change between the three distributions, but the meaning and the
informations provided are the same. So, the etymology of rc does not appear in the man
pages. Do you know how to recover it? Do (or did) the letters rc have some meaning in this
context?
7:53 p.m.
The best reference on that might be <
http://article.olduse.net/4857@Aucbvax.UUCP>gt;.
(Though also <http://article.olduse.net/203@brl-bmd.UUCP> – not sure what's
that one about.)
On Wed, Mar 23, 2016 at 9:20 PM, Rocky Hotas <rockyhotas(a)post.com> wrote:
Hello everyone,
I am Rocky and this is my first message. Before starting, I would like to
thank you for all the valuable informations and stories you post here.
About the History of Unix, I was wondering with another guy why the rc
script has that name. As many of you already know, and according to NetBSD,
FreeBSD, OpenBSD (current) manual,
"The rc utility is the command script which controls" the startup of
various services, "and is invoked by init(8)" (from DESCRIPTION).
"The rc command appeared in 4.0BSD" (from HISTORY).
Words may slightly change between the three distributions, but the meaning
and the informations provided are the same. So, the etymology of rc does
not appear in the man pages. Do you know how to recover it? Do (or did) the
letters rc have some meaning in this context?
Cheers,
Rocky
--
Mantas Mikulėnas <grawity(a)gmail.com>
7:57 p.m.
On Wed, 23 Mar 2016, Rocky Hotas wrote:
Hello everyone,
I am Rocky and this is my first message. Before starting, I would like to thank you for
all the valuable informations and stories you post here.
About the History of Unix, I was wondering with another guy why the rc script has that
name. As many of you already know, and according to NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD (current)
manual,
"The rc utility is the command script which controls" the startup of various
services, "and is invoked by init(8)" (from DESCRIPTION).
"The rc command appeared in 4.0BSD" (from HISTORY).
Words may slightly change between the three distributions, but the meaning and the
informations provided are the same. So, the etymology of rc does not appear in the man
pages. Do you know how to recover it? Do (or did) the letters rc have some meaning in this
context?
Cheers,
Rocky
I suppose it's Run Commands?
-uso.
9:14 p.m.
On Wed, 23 Mar 2016, Rocky Hotas wrote:
"The rc command appeared in 4.0BSD" (from
HISTORY).
I see that history added in the CSRG sccs revision 6.2 on 91/03/16. I
don't know why it says that as it was in 3BSD too. The /etc/rc concept
wasn't new in 4BSD.
The script was rewritten though for 4BSD to be used for "autoboot". Init
was extended to run /etc/rc to do a fsck if not booting single user
mode. (And if the fsck failed it could go into single user mode.)
The history should be fixed to be more clear about.
(For fun, read the usr/man/man0/changes from 4.0BSD about autoboot and
reboot.)
24 Mar
24 Mar
9:59 a.m.
Sent: Wednesday, March 23, 2016 at 10:14 PM
From: "Jeremy C. Reed" <reed(a)reedmedia.net>
To: "Rocky Hotas" <rockyhotas(a)post.com>
Cc: tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org
Subject: Re: [TUHS] Again about etymology: rc
The history should be fixed to be more clear about.
Yes, I agree.
(For fun, read the usr/man/man0/changes from 4.0BSD
about autoboot and
reboot.)
Ok! Thanks to you and to all for the many messages!
Rocky
6:59 a.m.
On Wed, 23 Mar 2016, Rocky Hotas wrote:
Words may slightly change between the three
distributions, but the
meaning and the informations provided are the same. So, the etymology of
rc does not appear in the man pages. Do you know how to recover it? Do
(or did) the letters rc have some meaning in this context?
"Run Commands."
--
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will
suffer."
25 Mar
25 Mar
1:19 a.m.
On Wednesday, 23 March 2016 at 20:20:05 +0100, Rocky Hotas wrote:
About the History of Unix, I was wondering with
another guy why the
rc script has that name.
I'm surprised nobody else has commented that we saw this about 3
months ago. Tom Van Vleck wrote about CTSS:
Louis wrote a disk loaded program called RUNCOM that
read command
lines from a file, substituted arguments into the command, and
requested the supervisor to run them, and then return control to
RUNCOM. This is a shell-like function.
...
Revised command processing, RUNCOM, and . SAVED are documented in
the second edition CTSS manual.
http://bitsavers.org/pdf/mit/ctss/CTSS_ProgrammersGuide_Dec69.pdf
Our assumption at the time was that the "rc" comes from this program.
The entire message is in the TUHS archives (29 December 2015, Subject:
" CTSS user interface?". Let me know if you can't find it.
Greg
--
Sent from my desktop computer.
Finger grog(a)FreeBSD.org for PGP public key.
See complete headers for address and phone numbers.
This message is digitally signed. If your Microsoft MUA reports
problems, please read http://tinyurl.com/broken-mua
2954
days inactive
2956
days old
8 comments
8 participants
participants (8)
-
Dan Cross -
Dave Horsfall -
Diomidis Spinellis -
Greg 'groggy' Lehey -
Jeremy C. Reed -
Mantas Mikulėnas -
Rocky Hotas -
Steve Nickolas